INTRODUCTION. 



NATURAL SCENERY. 



— " Fern, flowers, and grasses creep, 

 Fantastically tangled : the green paths 

 Are clothed with early blossoms, through the gra« 

 The quick eyed lizard rustles, and the "bills 

 Of summer birds sing welcome as ye pass ; 

 Flowers fresh in hue, and many in their class, 

 Implore the pausin? step, and with their dyes, 

 Dance in the soft breeze in a fairy mass ; 

 At every door the odorous jasmines rise. 

 Kissed by the breath of heaven, see')* fragrant from the skies."— Byron. 



" It is a beautiful country," wrote one of our Bengal visitors ; 

 " here, there are views and patches of scenery, green fields 

 and green lanes that lead back the mind to one's own loved 

 land." No contrast can be more striking than the scenery of 

 the Salvven, and that of the Hoogly, the last often that the eye 

 rests upon before reaching this coast. The interminable level 

 plains of Bengal, without the semblance of a hill for hundreds 

 of miles, are changed for mountains and valleys, cloud-capped 

 crags, and frowning precipices ; and green fields with immense 

 grotesque masses of mural limestone starting up in their midst, 

 like the gigantic spectres of an antediluvian world. — The dull- 

 est of all landscapes is exchanged for the most sublime and 

 picturesque. 



" It is a beautiful land" when seen on the coast, but it is 

 still more beautiful when seen amid its mountain streams ; 

 streams that cannot be surpassed in romantic beauty, even in 

 the annals of poetry itself. In some places they are seen leap- 

 ing in cascades over precipices from fifty to one hundred feet 

 high; in others, spreading out into deep, quiet lakes. In 

 some places, they run purling over pebbles of milk-white quartz, 

 or grass-green prase, or yellow jasper, or sky-blue slate, or 

 variegated porphyry ; in others, they glide like arrows over 

 rounded masses of granite, or smooth angular pieces of green 

 stone. In some places, nought can be heard but the stunning 

 sounds of" deep calling unto deep ;" in others, the mind is led 

 to musing by the quiet murmur of the brook, that falls upon 



